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There are plenty of alternate currencies [wikipedia.org] about that are perfectly legal

Given that the exact currency that has seen the guy being referenced convicted is in that list, what makes you so certain all the other ones aren't also going to be treated the same way by the government?

"Whoever, except as authorized by law, makes or utters or passes, or attempts to utter or pass, any coins of gold or silver or other metal, or alloys of metals, intended for use as current money, whether in the resemblance of coins of the United States or of foreign countries, or of original design, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than five years, or both."

OK, so it's not made from metal, or an alloy of metal. It's just data.

Unless they decide that the "coins" are made of bits of the hard drive, and the hard drive is an alloy of metal... just a minute, there's someone at the door...

# Barter clubs or corporate barter organizations are an example of alternative currency systems.# BerkShares........# Liberty Dollar is a private currency backed by silver, designed to be a nationwide alternative currency in the United States.

The guy is releasing SILVER DOLLARS. By definition they are worth much more than whatever garbage the Fed is printing.

The real counterfeit operation is what the Fed is involved in. This guy wants sound money back, and the Fed is destroying him for it.

# Barter clubs or corporate barter organizations are an example of alternative currency systems.
# BerkShares........
# Liberty Dollar is a private currency backed by silver, designed to be a nationwide alternative currency in the United States.

The guy is releasing SILVER DOLLARS. By definition they are worth much more than whatever garbage the Fed is printing.

The real counterfeit operation is what the Fed is involved in. This guy wants sound money back, and the Fed is destroying him for it.

No they're not. If they were worth more than US dollars, why can you buy them with US dollars? Why is the value of the silver in a Liberty worth less than the face value on the coin? I bet the guy running this scam looks at his bank balance and laughs at all the idiots who fell for it.

If you absolutely had to purchase a precious metal as a form of security against currency fluctuations there are far more secure ways to go about it.

Maybe you should read what I said, to wit - "If you absolutely had to purchase a precious metal as a form of security against currency fluctuations there are far more secure ways to go about it."

I am not saying that purchasing gold / silver is a bad thing. Just that if you do so through liberty dollars or some shady gold exchange in response to exhortations of Glen Beck then you are an idiot. There are far better ways to buy and sell precious metals. Liberty dollars were and are just a glorified MLM scam

So then is this a case of copyright violation? Because if it is, then given what MPAA and RIAA are trying to charge people with, I understand that the punishment in this case (15 years + 250K fine + confiscation of $7,000,000 worth of silver) is even too small.

Obviously he should be charged with like $10000 fine per coin that he released, because clearly, just like Metallica is losing money from the copyright pirates, the Fed here is hurting, right?

No, you don't understand copyright. It's closer to a case of trademark violation: the marks confuse the consumer into thinking the items are US Federal dollars, but they're not.

You also don't understand what "remotely" means. These "Liberty Dollars" are quite close to US Federal dollars, especially the famous "Liberty Dollars" circulated in the early 1900s, also made of silver.

You don't understand what "valuable" means. Silver is valuable because of convention, not utility (except for the rare dentist or me

Except (A) there have not yet been any injured parties who have actually claimed they've been defrauded, indeed the selling point is that it's not legal tender, and (B) Even if someone did mistake it for genuine US currency, the silver is worth quite a bit more than the face value of US coin.

Yes, patriotic people who create governments to protect our rights are pretty strong in America and elsewhere that reads Websites. Bad arguments from anarchists tend to provoke that kind of patriotism even in ordinarily apathetic people who still can tell when our liberty is threatened.

Your paranoia is a good explanation for how these "forces" mysteriously downrate your posts that "have no connection between each other". Your paranoia, and the low quality of your posts that any moderator can recognize.

Random guy trying to make "dollar-like" currency --> Criminal law, especially when that such counterfeiting could undermine the legitimacy of the existing currency and defraud people.

Both are completely unrelated.

If you do not believe counterfeiting could be endangering national security, you do not understand fundamental economics very well. Now calling it terrorism may be over the top, but remember that in countries engaged in conflict, it is very common for o

Random guy trying to make "dollar-like" currency --> Criminal law, especially when that such counterfeiting could undermine the legitimacy of the existing currency and defraud people.

- I don't understand the purpose of the arrows there, is that an implication or something else?

Anyway, the really counterfeiters of the US dollars are US Fed and Treasury.

The guy minting his own silver coins, and going out of his way to make sure everybody knows they are NOT in fact 'legal tender' is now deemed a terrorist, because the people who really counterfeit the US dollars are afraid that their worthless currency won't be staying in use too much longer.

Anyway, the really counterfeiters of the US dollars are US Fed and Treasury.

Just because you disagree with their policies does not make them counterfeiters. I too disagree with some of their policies -- I just have a different set of solutions in mind.

The guy minting his own silver coins, and going out of his way to make sure everybody knows they are NOT in fact 'legal tender' is now deemed a terrorist, because the people who really counterfeit the US dollars are afraid that their worthless currency won't b

Far from it -- however, your comments have not discussed anything of substance on economics, other than how much fiat currency sucks and how a currency backed by precious metals would be great.

Anyone could be an armchair economist, spewing forth opinions, but it is difficult to put together something tangible with the historic and economic burden of centuries behind you. There is a reason we switched to fiat currency, and there is no going back. It simply is not feasible, nor realistic. While I disagree wit

There is a reason we switched to fiat currency, and there is no going back. It simply is not feasible, nor realistic.

- speak for yourself. I have switched and I am not going back.

JP Morgan also understands it now, they accept gold as collateral from their counterparties.

Central banks are buying gold, have been for a few years now.

So you do not understand what is happening - fiat is being deliberately destroyed, and in fact all central banks understand this perfectly, as they keep buying and holding US debt in desperate attempt to keep the value from dropping to 0 in 1 day.

There is no such thing as a "corporate anarchist". Corporations are creations of the state. Without a state, there could be no corporations. A corporation is called a corporation rather than a company because the owners are shielded by government command from any and all liability for the actions of the corporation they own. This allows/FORCES the corporation to act in a sociopathic manner, extracting the absolute maximum amount of money for shareholders, whether in violation of the law or otherwise (th

In any case, any commodity is actually more valuable than the dollar, and the dollar has been on a steady decline since the Fed was created in 1913, as well as the IRS (and the Constitution was subverted for both of those abominations to take place)

The US dollar gained 100% of value over 19 century. It lost 98% of value since 1913. If you think you know what money is, then tell me, what kind of money is that? I'll tell you what kind o

- because there is much less silver in the world than there is even of gold. But silver is not very good at being a monetary metal, the only real money is gold.

However silver is almost as good, but it has too many industrial applications, so that's the only problem.

Of-course this problem is completely non-existent for US fiat - nobody needs them, nobody can buy anything for them. Well, in non-trivial amounts anyway. When some Arabs from Dubai tried getting rid of their dollars to buy an asset in USA - some

By the way, if the US gov't wants to be paid in US dollars for whatever taxes it wants to collect, then it better not include any transactions that are NOT conducted in the US dollars in calculating the said taxes.

--And really, this story we are in is exactly about that - people are transacting in some form of a currency in a way, that makes it impossible for the government to collect taxes upon.

He was intentionally trying to pass his currency off as Federally-backed and issued tender.

[citation needed]. As far as I can see, the guy went out of his way to say they were not legal tender.

In any case, it seems far more honest than most of the rather dubious dealings which go on in the financial sector, but what's truly amazing is the language used in the case: "a unique form of domestic terrorism", "conspiracy against the United States", "organizations which seek to challenge the legitimacy of our democratic form of government". What the fuck? Whether or not you agree with his right to sell

If all of a sudden whatever it is they print is not recognized as actual money by actual people in real life, they do not have that power anymore.

They are fighting this with the biggest guns they have - terrorism accusations (that's because they can't stick child molestation to it yet) because they are afraid of losing power over what money is and over what they can do by printing it.

US dollar coins have 7 cents worth of metal in them. Does that mean they are fraudulent?

Also, there is this thing called "minting costs". There is this other thing called "numismatic value". Look them up. No one lost any money on buying a Liberty Dollar. Well, except those who didn't get their orders filled because the US government stole their silver.

The Liberty Dollar people said the coin had value because it was made of Silver not because it had a dollar value stamped on it. The Liberty dollar had less Silver in it than people paid for it and had waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay less silver in it than the face value of the coin which is what people tried to pass it off as. And their silver dollars were rebased from $20 to $50 (and if I remember correctly they rebased from $10 to $20 earlier). If the face value was not important then why were they re

Mt. Gox accepts EUR as well via bank transfer in the EU, although they will be converted to USD at the current exchange rate. (don't remember which source they use for that, ask them if you're interested.)

I cloned the project but I can't get it to even minimally execute without a lot of changes. What versions of Python and SQLAlchemy are you using? I have Python 3.1.2 and SA 0.6.3 as shipped with Ubuntu 10.10.

I really like BitCoin, But the biggest problem is the "goldrush" is over. While new bitcoins can still be mined, it's expensive, and takes time. Oh, the other big problem is that not enough people accept them. But, meh.

More implementations of the software are always good. But, they don't actually matter. It's the blockchain that matters. So long as the various implementations use the same blockchain (which is the cryptographic chain that indicates which address has how many bitcoins), things will stay together.

The biggest potential problem is Google, or another big organisation, starting a new blockchain, and splintering the bitcoin community. Google actually probably has enough processing power to mine quite a lot of bitcoins from the current blockchain anyway.

I'll give you one BTC if you join.
I accept BTCs as payement for freelance development.
Mining is not the normal way of acquiring BTCs. Just like mining gold is not the usual way to get money when you have a money based on the gold standard.

More implementations of the software are always good. But, they don't actually matter. It's the blockchain that matters. So long as the various implementations use the same blockchain (which is the cryptographic chain that indicates which address has how many bitcoins), things will stay together.

I saw someone else say this was not a full P2P implementation. One concern I see is if too many user run "client only" implementations then the network may fall apart.

Bitcoin uses cryptography to verify who performed an action but it uses a P2P network of many cooperating nodes to track what transactions have happened so far and reject transactions that would conflict with previous ones (the "spending money you have already spent" scenario). Without this tracking the system would fall apart.

It is at the moment still quite profitable to mine on AMD GPUs, assuming your electricity costs are about $0.10/kWh. You will easily recoup at the very least half the price of a high-end video card if you jump in right now.
Also the network continuously self-adjusts itself to distribute coins over a long period of time, as this graph shows:
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/File:Total_bitcoins_over_time_graph.png [bitcoin.it]
As you can see, we have only generated about 5 million coins so

Why is splintering bad? It provides alternative currencies, each with their own inflation rates and relative values. The currency market among them is easy to automate, also distributed without a controlling middleman, so holding multiple alternatives at once doesn't prevent liquidating any into another. The result is the purest free market for value possible, so long as the information used to value items in the market is freely available.

I really like BitCoin, But the biggest problem is the "goldrush" is over. While new bitcoins can still be mined, it's expensive, and takes time. Oh, the other big problem is that not enough people accept them.

Difficulty of generating new Bitcoins is a feature, not a bug. If it were easy, they would have no value. The purpose of Bitcoin is to function as a form of money for saving and exchange, not to get rich by using your processor to print money.
But you're right on the second part, the biggest obstacle is the lack of businesses that accept them.

Yep, people don't realise how bitcoin actually works. Anyone can fork it and fork the currency. If google get a majority of users on their new client they can simply update the client to accept whatever rate of inflation they want, and the currency will fork, which usually causes the minority to follow.

Which I'm not sure why is a good idea and how harmful it is supposed to be to bitcoin.

Bitcoin is also fundamentally flawed because any government could crash it. Bitcoin cannot possibly be secure against attack unless more than 50% of the worlds available CPUs were all committed to non-colusion. At the moment its something like 0.0001%, even private companies would have the CPU power to take it down.

This might be true. Probably not 50% but we can at least say that we need a lot more. At least in reserve, to counter an attack. But you are saying that anything anyone does that governments might not like is fundamentally flawed, aren't you. It's a little hard to swallow for me. Also there is no apparent reason to assume that they will carry out such an attack, states don't work that way. I would be more worried about leg

You are correct that bootstrapping a currency is the most difficult step. However it appears to have done just that: it went from zero to hundreds of merchants in a little over a year: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Trade [bitcoin.it]

Of course, there is still a long way to go (most of them are individuals or very small shops), but the very fact it has already grown so quickly and so fast is very encouraging. It was possible because of its truly unique and revolutionary features that really no other currency provide, nota

I don't see a problem with bitcoin in theory... but throughout history no currency has been stable without an army to enforce its existence. Disband the USA police/Army and the dollar would collapse. Gold and other universally liked-by-all-humans minerals retains its value for the new owners if someone steals it. Cant say the same about BC.

That's why this will never go anywhere... look at e-gold, it was doing millions of dollars a day in transactions and then as soon as the owners ran into legal trouble (wh

The thing with bitcoin is that there is no central authority to control it. New bitcoins come about by "mining", not by some central authority minting new coins, or printing new notes. Gold too has collapsed in value before.

What makes a currency worth something, is that people are willing to accept it in exchange for goods. Gold is only worth as much as it is now, because people are all like "ooh, shiny". It's intrinsic value (what it can be used for), is not anything like how much people are willing to pay

I don't see a problem with bitcoin in theory... but throughout history no currency has been stable without an army to enforce its existence. Disband the USA police/Army and the dollar would collapse. Gold and other universally liked-by-all-humans minerals retains its value for the new owners if someone steals it. Cant say the same about BC.

Armies do not enforce currency or value. At best, they can create a stable environment for an economy to fluorish.

I don't see a problem with bitcoin in theory... but throughout history no currency has been stable without an army to enforce its existence. Disband the USA police/Army and the dollar would collapse.

You almost hit Bitcoin's problem spot on. The reason that fiat money like the US$ is viable is that there is an entity - the US government - that can force a US$-denominated debt on you via taxation. This taxation creates demand for the money, which is what ultimately underpins the money's value, once you go beyond all the circular reasoning of "You work for US$ because Walmart accepts US$ in payment for goods because Walmart needs US$ to pay its suppliers because the suppliers need US$ to pay their employe

There is good reason to disagree with your example as well. The biggest problem with your argument is that unilateral government spending started immediately and yet the economy did not recover until the late 1930s. There had been other depressions which were significantly shorter with no unilateral government spending. Ultimately, it is very hard to make a good argument about causes and solutions to the Great Depression because the various economic factors were so complicated. You had the stock market cras

Bitcoin's existence is essentially technically insuppressible at this moment: it is fully peer-to-peer, there is no central server or company that can be shut down.

The only risk is social: in other words people could simply lose interest in it. But its network strength (hash rate) has demonstrated a remarkable exponential growth recently. It has doubled every 27 days, continuously, in the last 15 months: http://blog.zorinaq.com/?e=49 [zorinaq.com] This implies, of course, popularity. So I would say it is very improbab

approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)

( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses(x) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected(x) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the mone

Your responses are wrong. They do not accurately describe the anti-spam system that was proposed.

The idea of "email stamps" to directly counter the essence of spam's advantage (bulk messaging is extremely cheap) is a solid one. Indeed it underlies the limits on junk postal mail, which are reversed to encourage junk that subsidizes individual items' postal delivery.

Your form response is a good example of the lack of imagination and abundance of inertia that leave us with a badly managed spam problem.

That any negotiations were needed to get DigiCash to succeed suggests to me it was doomed from the start. Bitcoin has no central authority, and therefore no company to take the entire currency down with it when it inevitably goes under.

Actually I've seen people offering trades in precision all the way down to.0001BC. I still question the point of limiting the total amount to 20million BC (or 2^11 fractional-units). Whilst I understand the intent behind placing an absolute limit on the number of BC in circulation, I don't believe the number chosen provides enough liquidity to sustain global-scale economics.

Being a naturally deflationary currency I can see this being problematic eventually

This is the fundamental aspect of bitcoin which I think will simply make it a curiosity. Deflationary currency encourages hoarding, because simply holding currency is better than spending it. It's also problematic because rational participants would never borrow a bitcoin (with interest) because it will likely cost more (in nominal terms) later. That doesn't even touch on the psychological effects related to nominal amount

Actually, I think using World of Warcraft gold as currency should work very well in the short term for those who want to trade real-world goods of lesser value, but it has a number of drawbacks:

1. It's dependent on a centralised server, so can be easily tracked or disrupted.2. It's controlled by a single company, so it may lose its value the day Blizzard decides to discontinue the game.3. The supply isn't fixed, but may be changed at a whim when the rules of the World of Warcraft game are changed. This coul

Because we don't want Blizzard to own the wallet and the cash? Because Blizzard is concerned with game balance and profit from players, not arbitrating an international currency? Because we don't want to pay an extra $15 a month to participate in the digital economy? Because we don't like currencies with inflation rates of over 1000%? Take your pick.

That's the nice thing about Bitcoin: it is less dependent on trust than all other payment systems.

Most significantly, as a Bitcoin user, you do not have to trust a central authority or 3rd party (eg. Paypal or a bank) that may initiate chargebacks, or freeze your accounts, because there is no middleman in Bitcoin.

Of course you need to trust the Bitcoin design itself. But the system has proven its robustness so far, and will (hopefully) continue to do so. If you are curious you may find a list of attacks

Written by someone who has absolutely no clue on how it works. Thanks for your incredible insight.

I've used Bitcoin and I can tell how it works. It's an elegant system for producing cryptographically signed "currency" which can be exchanged over P2P. However elegant it may be, it's also quite naive and/or dishonest to overlook some of it's shortcomings.

Namely, it is the people who got in early and mined coins or bought them at a low exchange rate who have most to gain. Latecomers have little to gain and the most to lose. If the system collapses or is regulated out of legitimacy, it is the latecomers who will suffer the most. I would not go so far as calling it a pyramid scheme but it certainly shares some similarities in terms of who benefits and who does not.

How could it collapse? In numerous ways. Various governments might start auditing / taxing people who use it as a form of currency. They might legislate against it, deeming it to be bogus financial instrument. It might get a reputation for money laundering and all the popular exchanges get shutdown along with the accounts. A rival to bitcoin might appear which is easier to use or has other benefits.Someone might develop a crack / exploit which allows them to inject "poisoned" transactions over P2P where the database is corrupted, or worse compromises Bitcoin such that wallets are wiped or drained of funds. A popular exchange is hacked and all the money is stolen. There might be a run on bitcoins if the system shows sign of collapse / compromise and the exchanges refuse to exchange bitcoins into dollars.

All of these scenarios are feasible and I think it only a matter of time before the system is hit by one of them. I have no issue with bitcoin per se but I do not see the long term viability in the system.

Namely, it is the people who got in early and mined coins or bought them at a low exchange rate who have most to gain. Latecomers have little to gain and the most to lose. If the system collapses or is regulated out of legitimacy, it is the latecomers who will suffer the most. I would not go so far as calling it a pyramid scheme but it certainly shares some similarities in terms of who benefits and who does not.

had you read anything about the idea behind this, you would know that that 'shortcoming' you speak of, was devised as a means to increase adoption rate of the system at the start - if you contributed to system early, you would get more coins. if you bought coins early, the would be worth more. this provided its fast adoption rate.

please dont talk out of your ass next time.

as for 'auditing/taxing' people, taxing is already a reality regardless of what means you use as money. tax is not relevant to mone

Thanks for your condescending reply but I'm completely aware how it functions. I have the client, I've played with mining programs like poclbm chiefly to put OpenCL to some use. I've read the documentation, I've read the philosophy. I can see what it does, I understand the technology, what it aspires to do and how it's likely to be brought to it's knees. As such I've hilighted some very likely scenarios the system will fail.

I can only surmise that only fools would invest real money in this system. As I sa

Funny how you are so pissy about it being a pyramid scheme when you go on to describe a pyramid scheme to a T.

But then, that's about all any form of fiat currency is--a pyramid scheme. It goes from those with the printing press to the government to the corporations to the businesses to you. You pay the most to the inflation tax demons, while those higher up the pyramid gain purchasing power by getting quicker access to the freshly printed money.

It's an elegant system for producing paper "currency" which can be exchanged for products. However elegant it may be, it's also quite naive and/or dishonest to overlook some of it's shortcomings.

Namely, it is the people who got in early, when the purchasing power of those pieces of paper was higher and there were much fewer of them, or they got them at Fed discount window who have most to gain. Latecomers have little to gain and the most to lose. If the syste

As you appear to be an apologist for liberty dollars and the like I wouldn't expect a better answer off you. Of course real money has its flaws but it is backed by governments and banks who put guarantees in place about it's value, the safety of your investment in banks, rules that govern trading, taxation, exchange rates etc. If you exchange real money for funny money you will be the one left holding the bag when the scheme collapses. And it will collapse.

What I am potentially concerned with, is not that the code itself contains some nasty stuff, but more that the algorithm behind creating and using the "coins" - the mathematics involved in it - is sophisticated enough that while some people will understand the general rule and find it sound, the author may know of some little-known caveat, exception, some specific parameter value that may compromise the security.

Anonymous Coward, why do I see this in every freaking article on Slashdot?! You're always arguing with yourself like a deranged meth addict in withdrawal. Get some help, man... and stop talking to yourself. People are gonna think you're crazy!

look at the source and let us know if you can copy/ counterfeit bitcoins without first cracking a cryptographic hash function (sha2)
You don't have to trust anyone to use this if you read the source code and understand how it works.

Well, if it's done by people who read Java, and understand the problem domain well enough use it, it's ok. If they share their insight with the less fortunate individuals, even better. But generally don't expect everyone to do their homework themselves. Think about it. Nobody (as in 'most of us') questions the authority of paper money despite the fact that paper money isn't what it used to be anymore. Nobody cares to look at how exactly paper money is generated (its value that is, because, obviously, it's j

My question is, how much electricity will be spoiled to "create" the 21 million bitcoins?

Let me answer your question with a question:

How much electricity will be spoiled to create the next 21 million actual/physical coins?

Mining, milling, and transporting actual silver (or zinc or whatever the government mints are making coins out of these days) isn't exactly an environmentally friendly operation, either. At least once the 21-million bit-coin market is established, the virtual coins will last indefinitely, which is more than one can say for their real-life counterparts.

Reliably enforcing taxation is pretty much impossible regardless of the currency. The main way western countries (at least the USA the UK) have got arround this is by collecting most of the tax from larger entites, the more transactions an entity is involved in the greater the chance of getting caught cheating and the more thay have to lose when they do cheat. While it is nominally the employee being taxed the taxes are required to be calculated and collected by their employer. Similarly sales tax/vat is co

I think you might be conflating two books; in Snow Crash, there was still definitely physical currency. A memo was forwarded around the US Government, instructing not to use US Currency as toilet paper, and YT pays drug dealers for Snow Crash in physical Kong Bucks.

i would call you a man with no brains - early adopters had basically 'made' the bitcoin network. they are the ones who helped it gain traction, while you were sitting on your ass. if you are jealous, you should have adopted bitcoin at the start like them. they deserve the coins they got, because they contributed to the system at the most critical moment.

the point of network is to provide an exchange currency. not a means for making money. the people who adopt the network, should be adopting it for the exchange currency already. you are not supposed to make any coins out of thin air, unless the network is small and needs help.